Our Short Answer: Consistently creating and distributing different types of content from blog posts, to infographics, to videos and more can boost your SEO & visibility dramatically.
Content marketing is useful for every type of business. It’s more cost-effective than paid methods and can in many cases deliver more leads. Organic traffic is 6X more effective than paid search at boosting SEO ranking.
It’s cheaper AND more effective; what’s not to love?
Every content marketer shares a goal of creating something that educates, inspires and engages their audience. Something that people might even want to share with their own network.
The more content that you consistently create targeting the right keywords, the higher your business will rank in SEO, and you’ll be that much closer to showing up at the top of the Google results page. You’ll be right there for the visitors who’ll stick around because you clearly understand the ins and outs of the problem they need solving, based on how much content comes out in your blogs.
It’s best to create a variety of content. It gives you plenty of room to experiment and see what works for your target audiences. Here are some of the most effective forms of content for SEO:
1. Blogging - Great For SEO And Building Trust
Blogging is easy to do and it’s one the most effective ways to get ranked for your content. Today, people want to be educated and they are searching for the most useful answers to their questions. Having your target audience in the top of your mind is essential to creating high ranking content. When you do blogging right, you’ll:
- Attract, engage and delight visitors
- Boost your SEO ranking on Google and other search engines
- Attract new visitors to your site
- Link a sense of expertise to your brand.
The best thing about blogging is the potential variety. There is not one option, but several. You can write a “how to” post, a listicle, the top ten Solutions to a problem, and more.
You can also generate referral traffic by offering to write a guest post for someone else. Cross-marketing can help both sites dramatically, with the use of backlinking!
To get started blogging, use a tool like Social Mention or Board Reader to find what topics get the most engagement. You can also use tools like Share Through or IsItWp Analyzer to identify irresistible click-worthy headlines. Click here for a few of our blogging tips and the latest practices:
Click Here for a list of a few more social monitoring tools that you may find useful
Long Form Blog Posts
You might be wondering how this is different from your average blog. Other than taking more time to produce, it also has a positive impact on your ranking. Studies performed on Sweor.com show that long form content dominates page one search results.
One example is SERP IQ’s study that charted top 10 search results in search queries by content length. The top search result was 2416 words, while the 10 result was 2032 words.It’s interesting to note that not one of the results was less than 2000 words. Similar studies like Backlinko’s show that Google first page results typically display articles that are 1950 words or more.
However, this doesn’t mean that Google only looks at word count. There are other factors that help long form content to rank higher.
Research by HubSpot shows that quality long form content has more backlinks*, a factor that increases the ranking of content. Google also understands that people prefer seeing all information in one place, rather than people having to look at several places. Other research shows that long-form content earns 77.2% more links ahd social media shares.
*A Backlink is when a page of another website links to a page on your website.
2. Video - Good For SEO & Highly Digestible
We love stats so here are a few Video SEO stats that show how media will get you a higher ranking:
- “62% of Google Universal Searches include Video”.
- Visitors will stay 2 minutes longer on web pages that feature a video.
- Video is 50 times more likely to boost organic ranking on Google than plain text results.
Video is growing. YouTube has 2 billion users and many companies find it faster and more effective to communicate their message on video. It’s shown that this type of content can not only boost brand awareness, but also lead generation and click through rates.
Video also keeps people on your site for longer. If you have lots of traffic, but people are leaving after a few minutes, video is just the thing to improve bounce rates. The key thing here is Google carefully looks out for how long people stay on your site once they arrive.
Publishing content on YouTube, your social media channels, but also on VOD ( Video On Demand) platforms will earn you referral traffic, and also increase high quality traffic. The more your content is shared across social platforms the more you will boost your visibility.
Research by Mathew Woodward found that when content was shared thousands of times on Facebook it helped their client rank #1 and #4 for the same search using the keyword “unhealthy foods”. The link to the content was also included in an answer box on Google.
3. Social Media Content - Okay For SEO & Great For Engagement
While social media doesn’t directly impact your rank on a search engine, it does indirectly influence factors that affect your SEO. Sharing content on all your social media channels can drive more traffic to your site, and possible re-shares of your content, acting as a backlink!
The more people share and engage with your content, the more Google will see you as being authoritative and trustworthy. A big factor in increasing your rank on search engines is backlinks.
4. White Papers - Good For SEO & Great For Trust
White papers are heavily researched marketing content that are supported by a lot of data and references. They boost your trust and authority with search engines, prospects and your customers. White papers are most effective for your rank on search engines when they are intermixed with ebooks, guides and promotional booklets.
They are usually presented in a PDF format which is searchable and indexed by Google. By showcasing your brand’s expertise in a niche area, it also adds credibility to your products and services.
In terms of style, white papers are more formal than blog posts. They take weeks and months to write, rather than a few hours. It can be hard work to put a white paper together, so there are faster ways to show your results.
One fun way is using WP Forms, this app has a built in dashboard which enables you to get a visual graphic of your results. The reason is that it offers comprehensive insight into industry trends, and data other people can use and share in their content and link back to yours.
5. Infographics - Good For SEO & User Friendly
Infographics are one the most shared forms of content. In fact 84% of companies find infographics to be effective when promoting their business. You want to look attractive, but even more important is to create information that is engaging and reliable.
Infographics are able to communicate complex information which gets an audience’s attention which can increase dwell time on a webpage. SEMRush research shows that using infographics with “other web elements” earns a higher ranking on search engines. It can also be shared months after it has been published.
To get your infographic to be shared, it’s a good idea to provide sharing buttons, so any viewers can share it and you can gain as much reach as possible. You can also add an infographic to your marketing email, share it across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
6. Images - Good For SEO & Understandability
Another type of visual content is images. Did you know that every minute there are 46.200 Instagram posts uploaded and an amazing 15,000 GIFS sent via messenger?
When you add an image to your post on social media, there is more chance that people will share it with their network. According to JumpShot Data, 20% of all searches in the US happen on Google Images. So what does Google Images look for when ranking images / pictures on your website?
Alt Tags
Google will show unique images that align with the search query. It will not show the same picture more than once. You will also want to avoid using stock photos on your website or blog content too.
Search engines like Google scans the content of the page, where you place the picture and the picture itself. By adding alt tags which describe the picture it helps Google understand the content and how that relates to the variety of search queries it gets.
7. Case Studies - Good For SEO & Amazing For Lead Fostering
Case studies are proven ways of winning new business. They also feature a type of user generated content which features your clients or customers. They are a great chance to promote your successes, build trust and authority - key for boosting your SEO, and highlight your competitive advantage.
8. Podcasts - Good For SEO & Great For Engagement
This audio medium has gained popularity in recent years. This is partly due to its easily available and easy to consume. People can listen to them while at home or on the way to work. They are also great for boosting your traffic and your SEO ranking.
Podcasts are great for generating awareness of your brand, and adding rich content to your website as well as to support your link building efforts. Someone can link to your podcast on their site which boosts your SEO ranking.
Like every SEO practice, it’s important to add meta data that provides more details about your podcast content. When you add a description about your podcasts episode it enables search engines to understand what you are speaking about in a specific episode.
It’s also a great idea to add a different keyword for every episode of your podcast. Meta tags also help people discover you under certain categories online.
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